Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I know there has been a lot written about ball pythons being bred anytime of the year but I have a few questions for the people that have. Are they still being cooled like most other pythons species? I normally take advantage of the midwest winters for the ambient cooling and turn down the heat tape at night. Other than that I have never had to do much, the snakes are kept in my basement so the temp drops around 7-10 degrees in the winter months anyway.

This question stems from the fact some of my ball pythons have already started going off food, I'm guessing this is due to the unusually cool temps the last month. My basement has dropped around 5 degrees but I have done nothing to drop night time temps. Anyway I put two of them together last night just in case they don't start feeding through winter and drop too much weight to safely breed later in the year. The female is 1750 grams and the male is 650 grams. When I checked on them this morning at 7:00am they had hooked up and still are at 6:25pm. I will still separate them in a week or so and try feeding again.

I'm curious though if a 5 degree temp drop is adequate to get the female to ovulate without night time drops or will the stimulation of breeding cause ball pythons to ovulate regardless?

Thanks,
George Knaack
GLK HERP
www.reptilenews.com

I know I am not going to give you an answer george since I am less qualified to say than yourself. But I dont know if you remember me telling you about the friends I was helping move this summer. Anyway, they had quite a few snakes hook up just by putting them in the same containers during the moves. This was not even an attempt and they had a BCI pair hook up this year on accident that had bred last year so they did not even want this to occur. This ended up to be a tragic story since they moved early summer (weather conditions about the same as our goofy ones recently) and she had five babies. Sadly she was a virgin last year with the same size clutch and all these young were short lived...at least mom was still alright. I will also add that you are lucky to only get 5 degree drops. I told you about cages I was temp gunning at like 64 degrees some days. For those of you who are reading this and wondering how I could let such a drop occur I was moving around for a month and all my animals were in a larger room to control over what I have for them normally and most my heat tape was not on since i was having problems with it getting 140 degrees. George kindly helped me out by making a dimmer since I am the worst electricity person in the world who has almost died a few times changing light bulbs. anyway, I did not expect a problem since it was early august but illinois got some wicked cold temps this year that I have never seen and it threw me off guard. All animals made it though. Sorry for the most likely helpless post but I just wanted to mention I had other friends about 15 minutes from you who had a bunch of hook ups due to the weather.